Journalist found decapitated in Mexico

New York, July 26, 2011--The decapitated head and body of veteran
reporter Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz was found early this morning, according to
officials in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The journalist was abducted on
Sunday by armed men as she left her house.

Ordaz covered the police beat for the main Veracruz city newspaper,
Notiver, but her body was found near
the building of the newspaper Imagen.
Reporters in Veracruz told CPJ that the gruesome killing and the placement of
the body appeared to be an ominous message meant for the press. In a press
conference, the state prosecutor, Reynaldo
Escobar Pérez, denied that Ordaz's murder was linked to her work, and
said the evidence seemed to indicate that her killers were members of organized
crime. However, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's
office, Magda Zayas, told CPJ that the journalist's work was one of the
lines of investigation they are following.

A note found with the body seems to connect Ordaz's murder to
the killing of the widely known columnist Miguel Angel López Velasco, his
wife, and son, a photographer with the newspaper, on June 20, according to Zayas.
She said the note was signed "Carranza," and said: "Friends can also betray
you." The Associated Press reported that Veracruz state investigators have
identified former traffic police officer Juan Carlos Carranza Saavedra as the
main suspect in the López murder.

Mexico's
Human Rights Commission said it would open its own investigation into Ordaz's
killing, according to the AP.

Ordaz is the fourth journalist from Veracruz to be killed
this year. In addition to López and his son, the
body of Noel López Olguín, a columnist with
the newspaper La Verdad de Jáltipan who went missing in March, was
found buried in a clandestine grave on May 31.

"Yolanda
Ordaz's murder is part of a troubling lethal trend that has made Veracruz an extremely dangerous place to be a journalist," said Carlos Lauría,
CPJ's senior program coordinator for the Americas.
"We urge Mexican authorities to conduct a thorough investigation, establish the
motives of the crime, and put an end to impunity in journalists' slaying by
bringing Ordaz's killers to justice."

Reporters in Veracruz city told CPJ that Ordaz had worked
for as long as three decades covering the police and was very close to López
and his family.

Drug-related violence now makes Mexico one of the
world's most dangerous countries for the press, according to CPJ research. Fifteen
journalists, including Ordaz, have been killed since 2010, at least four in
direct reprisal for their work. CPJ is investigating whether the other eleven
deaths were related to the journalists' work. According to CPJ's 2011 Impunity Index,
Mexico's rating worsened for the third consecutive year, with 13 cases of
journalists' murdered unsolved, putting it at eighth on the list. The index
identifies countries worldwide where journalists are murdered regularly and
governments are unable or unwilling to solve the crimes.